Spectrum of sexuality

On the night of June 16, 2001, Fred Martinez, Jr. was walking home from a party when he was chased into a rocky canyon on the outskirts of Cortez, Colo. The 16-year-old Navajo was cornered in the chasm’s nightmarish shadows and bludgeoned to death. Police found his body five days later. The crime shocked the community.

Martinez was openly gay, and his murder was easy to solve – the murderer, 18-year-old Shaun Murphy of Farmington, N.M., had bragged to his friends that he had “bug-smashed a fag.” The hate crime opened up frank discussions about perceptions of gender among Navajos, says Lydia Nibley, who delves into the topic in her new documentary, premiering Nov. 21 at the Starz Denver Film Festival.

Two Spirits explores the traditional Navajo belief in four genders and how it's changed over time. “Many Navajo people have been acculturated so much to Western ideas that the tradition has very nearly been lost,” Nibley says. “Learning more about who Fred was, we were instantly drawn to this idea of the balance of masculine and feminine.”

The first Navajo gender is a feminine woman, the second a masculine man, the third a male-bodied person with feminine characteristics (nádleehí) and the fourth a female-bodied person with a masculine essence (dilbaa). When Martinez came out to his mother, she identified him as nádleehí.

Nibley and her husband Russell Martin, a producer, learned of Martinez’ murder through friends of theirs who lived in Cortez. While looking into the case themselves, they found the concept of complex gender systems, a belief that many Native American tribes once held for thousands of years, fascinating.

The Navajo culture traditionally values the balance of masculine and feminine to maintain sacred order, so someone who is gifted with an understanding of both is seen as valuable, and is treated with respect, Nibley says. Historically, "two-spirited" people fulfilled both male and female roles in Indian society; among the Lakotas male-bodied two-spirits commonly married widowers so that they could parent step-children without any risk of bearing their own children whom they might favor more.

Martinez' family has not been able to afford a headstone. His mother  leaves gifts for him, including the plastic key chains he liked to collect, one of which reads, "Don't Hate Me Because I'm Beautiful."

Over the centuries, however, homophobia from European settlers tainted Indian perceptions of multiple genders. Martinez, like so many other gay and transgendered people, was mercilessly teased at school, by Navajos and whites alike, although his friends and family say he kept a positive attitude.

The film's  emotional center is Pauline Mitchell, Martinez' mother, who raised Martinez (nick-named F.C.) and his five older brothers by herself on the reservation. Mitchell's grief has been well-documented, especially at the 2002 trial of Shaun Murphy, who pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and was sentenced to 40 years:

F.C. had many difficult times in his short life, (Mitchell said). Much of this was related to the fact that he was Navajo living in a world that does not honor and respect different ways, and also that he was nádleehí -- Two-Spirit -- and he could comfortably walk the path of both male and female... It is not easy to grow up as Navajo, nádleehí and poor. But these are facts of life. He was not ashamed of who he was and neither was I. I now tell you that I dearly loved my precious son and was proud of all that he was ...

Mr. Murphy, you took my son away from me in the most vicious way I can imagine. You smashed his head with a rock. You were covered with his blood. When you left him that night a year ago in the Pits, not even a mile away from here, you knew you beat him with a rock and you felt it break his skull. You knew how much he was bleeding because you were covered with his blood. You deliberately left him there to die- - or already dead. And my son lay there for a week and all you said about it was that you had "bug-smashed a fag."

The reaction to the film, which also features anthropologists, journalists and multi-gendered Indians throughout the United States, has been mostly positive. The filmmakers plan to screen the documentary at the Navajo Nation's museum, as well as various other human-rights, LGBT and Native American film festivals. Sign up for their e-mail list to keep updated, and click here to catch the trailer for Two Spirits.

“We understood that this would be important now, that these two stories would be appropriate: the life and death of Fred Martinez and this Native American tradition and spectrum of sexuality,” Nibley says.